Mathematics

This project provides rural middle school teachers and career counselors professional development, and the support needed to collaborate with each other and local community assets in designing, integrating, and implementing effective STEM content and career development activities. School teams co-develop project-based learning units that incorporate a place-based education perspective involving STEM assets, careers, and stakeholders from the local communities for middle school rural youth that intentionally infuse STEM careers in their area with STEM content.

The Math Partners intervention is informed by the concepts of Funds of Knowledge and Community Cultural Wealth that inform our growing understanding of how to help teachers partner with families to support early math learning. Teachers receive Practice-Based Coaching in small groups with other teachers and will form design teams in each Math Partners classroom. The design teams of teachers and families will inform how the teachers provide math activities, materials, and instruction.

We explored the impacts of enhanced Integrated Math I exit tickets that support students in determining how well they know material compared to typical exit tickets. We hypothesized that these enhancements would improve students' confidence calibration, mathematics self-efficacy, mastery-approach goals, and mathematics performance more than typical exit tickets. We used a pretest-intervention-posttest design, with students randomly assigned to one of two conditions within their classroom: 1) enhanced exit tickets or 2) typical exit tickets.

The purpose of our project is to develop, test, and refine children’s computational thinking (CT) learning progressions. This research will provide early elementary educators and curriculum designers with a framework for understanding children’s development of CT and will inform future CT instruction efforts for standards, curricula, teaching practices, and assessment. This project will also provide valuable information about how to integrate CT into early mathematics education in feasible and accessible ways for classrooms.

Data science is transforming science and industry, with a strong demand for skilled professionals. The LogicDataScience (LogicDS) curriculum at Florida Virtual Schools (FLVS) introduces high school students to this field and related careers, aiming to overcome educational barriers, particularly for rural students lacking access to STEM courses and qualified teachers.

Data science is transforming science and industry, with a strong demand for skilled professionals. The LogicDataScience (LogicDS) curriculum at Florida Virtual Schools (FLVS) introduces high school students to this field and related careers, aiming to overcome educational barriers, particularly for rural students lacking access to STEM courses and qualified teachers.

Our project explores simulations focused on eliciting and interpreting elementary students’ mathematics thinking provide preservice teachers with formative assessment opportunities. They have been used with preservice teacher educators and their students three partner programs, and administered for data collection in fourteen other programs. Our studies (1) examine how feedback from the simulations strengthens preservice teachers' abilities to elicit and interpret student thinking, and (2) establish the reliability and validity of the simulations as assessment tools.

Despite its importance, there is little research on children's use of and reasoning with different approaches to multiply or divide multi-digit numbers.

The project engages math teachers in lesson study to design and implement design-based lessons to teach geometry concepts.

This project contributes to advancing knowledge on STEM education focusing on societal challenges by harnessing the convergence of STEM subjects, including data science and computer science, to empower all students, especially multilingual learners (MLs). The research seeks to make two significant contributions. First, the project will develop a conceptual framework for multi-disciplinary STEM education with MLs to address pressing societal challenges. Second, the project will translate this conceptual framework into practical implementation in classrooms.